Conclusion

This conclusion offers an account of the main similarities between the experiences of early modern England and those of modern post-civil war states. It argues that many of the challenges that the republican governments faced have continued to confront states into the twenty-first century, and that, though the shape of a particular post-war settlement is historically contingent, the central issues with which its instigators must wrestle are not as temporally or geographically specific as we might expect. Further, it suggests that this is also true of many of the responses, from the use of amnesties and pardons to martyr narratives and the ‘othering’ of opponents. It provides one of the first transtemporal and transnational comparisons of Civil War memory and, in so doing, attempts to initiate further conversation between scholars of civil war memory across time and space.